THQ clears up Wii U “horrible, slow CPU” claim

A couple days ago, 4A Games developer Oles Shishkovtsov had some fighting words for Nintendo's new Wii U gaming console. He simply said that the new console has a "horrible, slow CPU." He was pretty straightforward in his comment obviously, but THQ's Huw Beynon -- who works full time as a representative of 4A Games -- says that Shishkovtsov's comment didn't tell the full story necessarily.

Beynon says that the Wii U, indeed, "isn't as fast as some of the other consoles out there", and Metro: Last Light is "a very CPU intensive game." However, Beynon says that "lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform." He thinks that Shishkovtsov's opinion of the Wii U's CPU had to do with the way that the game's engine was built, making it more difficult to develop the game on the Wii U.

Beynon then says the game could have been ported to iPad if 4A Games had wanted it to be, but he says that every console version stretches the developer's resources ever so much, and it turns out 4A's resources are stretched pretty far as it is with the three versions of Metro: Last Light that are planned.

However, Gustav Halling, a game developer at DICE -- makers of the Battlefield series, says that he's been hearing the same things from his industry contacts about the Wii U's slow CPU, saying that while the GPU and RAM can handle shaders/textures, things like physics and gameplay run on the CPU, and that can create a potential problem in the future. However, Halling notes that Wii U owners shouldn't have anything to worry about, since the new console will still have plenty of great games released for it.